1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and a community managing method. In particular, the invention relates to an information processing apparatus and a community managing method that are suitable for use in management of a community or a bulletin board in a virtual space.
2. Description of the Related Art
With recent spread of the Internet, a number of sites called homepages (Web pages) or the like have been established on the Internet by users of the Internet. The number of homepages is now increasing. Many homepages employ a service known as a bulletin board in which a user who visits the homepage can freely write a message to a “bulletin board” that may be read by others and read messages written and posted on the bulletin board by others.
Services of another kind exist on the Internet in which users having a common interest form a community (homepage) and they exchange information within the community. Such communities usually employ a membership system and members can use services such as the bulletin board mentioned above. In such a bulletin board system, a message that is sent, via the Internet, from a person who wants to have the message placed on the bulletin board is converted into a fixed-form image data and the image data is opened on the Internet.
The Internet has an enormous number of homepages and hence has a very large number of bulletin board services. This results in a problem that it is difficult for a user who has established a bulletin board in his own homepage to make a large number of users aware of its presence. If the existence of a bulletin board is not widely known, the number of messages written on the bulletin board is limited and activity on the bulletin board is reduced. Even when the presence of a bulletin board is widely known, if there is only a small number of written messages, users will recognize the inactivity and lose interest in the Web site and stop visiting it. Another problem that may arise is that a large part of users may browse a bulletin board but few will write messages. Thus, the number of written messages again becomes small and the service becomes inactive.
A bulletin board becomes active as replies to written messages are posted one after another. However, locating messages for which replies have not been posted, in other words, stale messages that appear to make a bulletin board inactive, requires recognition of the structure of written messages themselves, a process which takes time and labor. Further, a bulletin board must owner continuously manage the bulletin board in order to keep it orderly and easy to browse. Again, time consuming and laborious work.
For example, if the contents of a message written on a bulletin board are inappropriate, the manager needs to eliminate the message. Eliminating inappropriate messages while monitoring the entire bulletin board imposes a heavy load on the owner.
On a bulletin board that is provided in a community, only the members are allowed to write a message to and to read messages. A problem with bulletin boards is that even if the owner of a bulletin board wants to open discussions on the bulletin board widely to users other than members of the community, it is impossible to impose restrictions such as allowing only the members to write a message that may be read by all users, including those who are not members of the community.
There are also services in existence in which a message can be written to a bulletin board by e-mail. A problem with this method is that, although only the members are usually allowed to write a message to a bulletin board provided in a membership community as described above, non-member users can write messages by falsely inputting the name of a member in the “from” field (transmission source row) of an e-mail.
Where messages are written to a bulletin board by e-mail, it is possible to analyze the message on the bulletin board that a response e-mail is directed to (i.e., the prior message has been written to) as long as both messages are e-mail messages. However, this type of analysis is impossible when one or more of the messages has no mail header, such as the case when a message is directed to the bulletin board from the Web.
Further, where e-mails are exchanged between members of a community, there is a problem that their mail addresses are opened to the other members of the community and hence the security of members who do not want their mail addresses known (opened) to other members cannot be protected. There is another problem that when the owner of a community wants to know information about a member who is going to join or withdraw from the community. Often, it is necessary for the owner to contact the member by e-mail or the like which the owner cannot easily do if such information is not readily available.
Another problem in managing a community bulletin board is that even if the owner forces a member who behaves inappropriately to withdraw from a community, the same user can be registered as a member again.